A multi-head disk drive may include multiple heads and disk surfaces, where each head is configured to write data to and read data from a respective one of the disk surfaces. Each disk surface may be formatted into a number of data zones, where each data zone is associated with a particular data transfer rate. The format may vary from disk surface to disk surface within a disk drive. This may be due to differences in performance of their respective heads and/or other factor. When a sequence of data is written to the disk drive, format variations among the disk surfaces in the disk drive may result in undesirable large fluctuations in the sequential data rate of the disk drive.